Posts Tagged ‘technology’

Business Insider Australia says big businesses are starting to work with startups more and more because they can no longer afford to ignore the new technology and innovation that these small companies bring to the table.

Large corporations, like the big banks and telcos, are realising that the experimental and disruptive technologies startups often utilise can be used to satisfy consumer demands and take market share away from competitors.

Startup accelerators such as Pollenizer are cashing in on managing the changing relationship between startups and big business

“The whole thing is coming full circle,” Pollenizer CEO Phil Morle said, adding startups can grow from their dealings with big business and corporations can learn from the entrepreneurship of startups.

“We can’t be reactive anymore,” Morle said. “You have to almost industrialise the creation of new business without knowing what they are.”

Some of Australia’s biggest corporations including Telstra and Coca-Cola Amatil are working with startups because the risk of ignoring the technology and innovative ideas the small companies produce is too high.

Telstra boss David Thodey recently said if startups aren’t supported Australia will lose talent and good ideas and the telco has backed up Thodey’s words by launching its own tech startup accelerator Muru Digital to harness and develop a group of the country’s startups.

Virtualisation, which will soon become a standard industry recovery and available technique. Desktop virtualisation in particular is something for businesses to give more thought to as the technology develops.

Biometric Authentication - NAB now uses voiceprints to authenticate its customers for phone banking. This technology will be available for wider deployment soon.

Sydney Morning Herald reports today that Ric Richardson, owner of Uniloc, who won a multimillion dollar lawsuit against Microsoft for the use of his patent, only to face the horror of having the decision overturned, is launching further lawsuits against Sony America, McAfee Security, Activision (maker of video games), and Quark, Borland Software and Aspyr Media (software makers).

Mr Richardson contends that his patent has stood up to legal scrutiny, so he is taking these new lawsuits on principle. However, if succesful, the damages awarded will be given to charity.

Richardson, patented the technology designed to deter software piracy in the early 1990′s, and the proceedings against Microsoft have been ongoing since 2003. And yes, Uniloc is appealing the Microsoft decision to overthrow its lawsuit, by alleging bias from the Judge.

Continuing faulty antenna issues with the iPhone 4 may lead to a product recall, an embarrassing event for Apple, which may have costs of up to $1.5 billion USD. It is harder to put a price on the cost to Apple’s reputation.

Consumer Reports stated that it could not recommend the iPhone, due to the antenna, which, if the device is held a particular way, substantially cuts the phone’s reception resulting in “signal loss issues”.

This result was upheld by Engadgets, who in their own testing, found that the iPhone 4′s dropped calls and experienced low data rates at a much higher frequency than other phones. Engadget‘s full review of the iPhone 4 is here.

Consumer Reportsblog contains further detail as to why the iPhone 3 is preferable to the latest model.

At times like these, when I experience internet problems, I am inspired to comment on the state of Telecommunication Companies and their application of technology over time. And how useful is it?

Some quick observations:

-Vodafone Australia phone support attempts to resolve customers problems without having a staff person speak to them. The way in which this process has been established means that it is actually incredibly difficult to speak to a person, when the problem “category” you are experiencing is in their system, but the actual problem you have, is not, or requires you to speak to a person.

-Vodafone New Zealand has a person answering the phone. They resolve issues much more quickly.

-Telstra Bigpond Australia efficiently answers the phone, however today calling technical support I find myself talking to a machine. The voice recognition machine asks me what my type of internet is. Once I’ve advised, the voice then asks me, rhetorically whether I’ve been having problems with my internet or e-mail today. And if so, the issue has been identified and is being worked on. And, I am told, they don’t know when it will be fixed.

This system works great, to a certain extent. To then pursue this further, ie, to enquire as to the current status, the system fails on me. It goes through a very well thought out, yet entirely useless, process of determining what my problem is. When all I was trying to do was find out what the latest situation was.

-TelstraClear New Zealand, prefers to keep people waiting on hold for a long period of time. This exacerbates the issue when the internet stops working and one can only but sit there and wonder when it will be resolved, rather than making any concrete progress. TelstraClear did have a great feature which I used to use, which allowed you to leave a message so someone could call you back. I found this very reliable.

-To my most recent knowledge, all these companies are now allowing online payment, and they bill online too.

You can check your current balance online, even change plans online, these things are very handy. Many of the web based services they offer do add to the experience.

However, I would recommend they all consider doing some research into how people use and benefit from this technology. For example, all people I have spoken to about the Vodafone Australia automated phone process, do not like it. In fact, unless you just want to know what your balance is on your account, I think it fails in many respects. It doesn’t allow you to easily speak to a human, when you have something outside the square box of the system, you need to enquire about.

This has personally caused me a lot of frustration.

Technology provides us all with many benefits, but big companies need to spend more time on planning these systems. As it is not the technology that makes it work well, it’s the application and design of that technology that will save money, and customers’ time.